What is Restorer Ultimate?
Data recovery features:
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Support for the HFS/HFS+ (Mac), FAT/FAT16/FAT32/exFAT/NTFS/NTFS5,ReFS (Windows), and Ext2 / Ext3 / Ext4 FS, UFS1/UFS2 (Linux/Unix) file systems.
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SmartScan data recovery technology: absolute control over the data recovery process even from corrupted or formatted hard drives.
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Scalable technology: Perform a quick undelete for recently deleted files or perform a deep disk scan to analyze all files and partitions that have ever existed on the disk.
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Raw file recovery (disk scan using file signatures for recovery of known file types).
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File preview for graphics, video, and audio files to estimate chances for successful file recovery. Files can be previewed in the Demo mode for free.
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Advanced file search capabilities.
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Backup recovered data to any storage device, including external disks (USB, FireWire, etc.), internal disks, separate partitions, and even network and shared drives.
Advanced data recovery features.
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Scan multiple disk scans at once, even if the file systems and other parameters are different. Recovered data and search results is automatically combined into a single report.
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Custom-defined file signatures for raw file recovery. GUI editor makes it easy to teach Restorer Ultimate new "known file types."
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Advanced disk imaging capabilities, including support for region imaging, disk image compression, split image files (for storing on multiple devices or devices with FAT file size limitations).
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Powerful text/hexadecimal editor.
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Support for S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) attribute monitoring.
RAID reconstruction
Tarek_Hasan added Restorer Ultimate as alternative to RecoveRx
FoneDog added Restorer Ultimate as alternative to FoneDog Data Recovery
datarecoverytool added Restorer Ultimate as alternative to BLR Data Recovery Tool Software
Comments and Reviews
I recently had that main partition of one of my HDDs go bad and went to two major contenders for information recovery: Recuva and Testdisk / PhotoRec. Both of those programs were able to find many / most of the files that were on the drive, but when restoring some of the files that were on the drive (not recycled or previously deleted files) some of them just came back corrupted.
So I looked elsewhere, and tried a plethora of other options (primarily using free trials of the software in question) until I found Restorer Ultimate. Using the trial I scanned the drive and was able to rebuild the entire file tree of the drive post crash including 'lost files' (not restoring the partition however), something that I do not believe that Recuva is capable of (I am sure other software is capable of this too, and Recuva could have too and I am just a dunce and did not see the option). Because the trial only allows you to recover files around 128 KB or so (can't remember and too lazy to go back and look, but it does plainly give you the filesize limit for recovery for the trial), I bit the bullet and bought it.
To put it simply it worked. Perfectly. I recovered all of my files and the file tree (on another drive of course). So from now on this will be my go to recovery software, and I will probably use it in conjunction with GPARTED to rebuild drives.
Another thing to note about it is that it can possibly help rebuild RAID arrays, but I have no experience with that functionality so I will not comment on it.
Other than that, just some performance from when I ran it: it took ~8 hours to run for a 4 TB hard drive via SATA (with an FX 8350 CPU, if that has any bearing on performance), and recovered the main file tree with the files (~4 TB) and that took a few hours as well and then found another ~3 TB of 'Lost Files' (generally files that had been overwritten with chunks of their data missing, usually only the file title and extension were recognizable, but I could see this being helpful in extreme circumstances since the software allows you to look at the HEX data of the file) but these files could not be truly recovered.